28 April 2006

The experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be a sanctum.

While people are on the street, they adopt a style of "street behavior." When they come into a house they naturally want to get rid of this street behavior and settle down completely into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house. But it seems likely that they cannot do this unless there is a transition from one to the other which helps them to lose the street behavior. The transition must, in effect, destroy the momentum of the closedness, tension and "distance" which are appropriate to street behavior, before people can relax completely.

Evidence comes from the report by Robert Weiss and Serge Bouterline, Fairs, Exhibits, Pavilions, and their Audiences,Cambridge, Mass., 1962. The authors noticed that many exhibits failed to "hold" people; people drifted in and then drifted out again within a very short time. However, in one exhibit people had to cross a huge, deep-pile, bright orange carpet on the way in. In this case, though the exhibit was no better than other exhibits, people stayed. The authors concluded that people were, in general, under the influence of their own "street and crowd behavior," and that while under this influence could not relax enough to make contact with the exhibits. But the bright carpet presented them with such a strong contrast as they walked in, that it broke the effect of their outside behavior, in effect "wiped them clean," with the result that they could then get absorbed in the exhibit.

26 April 2006

When there's no real person to embody an abstract service, marketers sometimes create fictional people to personify brand attributes.

The Maytag repair man, General Motors' Mr. Goodwrench, the MicroWarehouse customer service rep, Dell's Uncle Dudley—these characters help us visualize service qualities (such as "reliable" and "responsive") that otherwise might not come across as credible. Of course, invented characters can also backfire: Microsoft's intrusive Office paperclip figure personifies much of what users find obnoxious about Microsoft itself.

24 April 2006

When you've followed the thread of empirical science to it's logical ends -- when you've split the atom; when you've mapped the human genome, when you've discovered every land mass and every species and mapped the periodic table -- what's next?

We are getting closer and closer; we have deconstructed everything to the tiniest fragments, and yet it feels like we are no closer to the truth. Where is the next frontier?

Networks.

The science of networks is the science of the future. It's the science of in-betweens, of connections, of dynamic ecosystems. It's inherent in the problems of turbulence, weather and heart attacks, of viruses, and nearly everything else that continues to elude us.

How many networks do you participate in? Are you on LinkedIn? Friendster? Flickr? Blogger?

Barabasi says that -- scientifically speaking --everything we thought we knew about networks is wrong.

How do we know? The internet is the first real man-made network that functions like an organic one. It's possible to study it because every aspect of it can be quantified and measured, and all its functions are known.

Exploration and analysis of the Internet has overturned many network theories of which, admittedly, I knew nothing. I won't go into them in detail here, but I highly recommend you buy the book. Barabasi's writing style is highly entertaining and readable, and the story fascinating.

The book ranges from six degrees of separation to Hollywood to cellular dynamics and why we haven't cured cancer yet. It talks about the long tail, the 80/20 rule, social networking and many other topics of interest to the Web 2.0 crowd.

One of the most interesting things to me is how wrong we were, and how little the subject had actually been explored until recently.

Which brings me to a fascinating opportunity called MeshForum, an upcoming three-day event in San Francisco (May 7th, 8th and 9th) that will bring together experts in all disciplines for an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation on networks: what they mean to us, what they can do for us, and their promise for the future.

You begin this way:this is your hand,this is your eye,this is a fish, blue and flaton the paper, almostthe shape of an eyeThis is your mouth, this is an Oor a moon, whicheveryou like. This is yellow.

Outside the windowis the rain, greenbecause it is summer, and beyond thatthe trees and then the world,which is round and has onlythe colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fullerand more difficult to learn than I have said.You are right to smudge it that waywith the red and thenthe orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these wordsyou will learn that there are morewords than you can ever learn.The word hand floats above your handlike a small cloud over a lake.The word hand anchorsyour hand to this tableyour hand is a warm stoneI hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,which is round but not flat and has more colorsthan we can see.It begins, it has an end,this is what you willcome back to, this is your hand.

"...one of the most effective sales presentation tools that I've ever been taught. Write your entire presentation out and then get some colored markers. For all the facts that you have written down, highlight them in red. Next, color all your humor in green. Lastly, color all your audience participation in blue.

Ok, now step back and look at your work of art. What, you don't see any green for humor? Where is the blue, for audience participation? Even if you are giving a sales presentation to manage $50 million dollars for a pension fund, you will be amazed by the audiences receptivity if you make the presentation about them. Red is a nice color but make sure your presentation has some green and blue to involve your audience.Read on in Sales Presentation Training

"The Encyclopedia Brittanica has expressed its extreme displeasure with the Nature science journal over its comparison of Britannica to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is just as good as Brittanica, so the story goes. At minimum, Nature had described Wikipedia content as 'no more unreliable' than that in the venerable Brittanica. Now it has been suggested in The Register by Brittanica that Nature's research leaves much to be desired:

'Almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,' says Britannica."